If you have a map handy, you can follow our route. From Tisovec we drove south to Hnúšťa, then west through Kokava, Detva, Zvolen, and Žiar nad Hronom, where we turned north again. Up through Handlová and Prievidza, to Bojnice and then Čičmany, through Rajec where the water comes from to Žilina, and then Strečno; then east through Martin and Ružomberok and finally south through Banská Bystrica and the Tesco hypermarket and on to Brezno and then down, home-again-home-again-jigetty-jig to Tisovec.
Bojnice is home to the largest zoo in Slovakia, and to Bojnice Castle. Of all the castles in Slovakia, this is the one that draws comparisons to Neuschwanstein. In Slovak it's not a hrad but a zámok--not a fortress but a chateau. As with many castles, the current building was constructed on the site of earlier castles. We joined a tour that consisted of the four of us, a French (or at least francophone) couple, and a Slovak dad with two little boys. The first part that the tour went through was rooms furnished in a newer (17th to 19th century) style. There were some truly gaudy rooms, although, to their credit, gaudy in a completely unexpected way. One room, for example, had a ceiling covered in square sections, each section with a cherub's head at the center and four wings behind it, and all gold gilt. Another was done in a Turkish style, with brightly-colored panels and Arabic quotations from the Koran. The rooms had many paintings, as such places are wont to do; one painting was of two leopards attacking a moose. I did not think moose and leopards coexisted anywhere. The chapel was an enigma. The walls and ceiling were filled with 19th-century paintings, but all of the separate paintings had numbers on certain sections. It was kind of reminiscent of a paint-by-numbers, and if the guide explained
the numbers, it was in Slovak, so we'll never know what they were for.We walked through a courtyard and peered down into a deep well. Then we went into another part of the castle, and walked up a wide circular staircase and went into rooms on each floor. This part of the castle was decorated in an older style, say 16th to 17th century. It was the cooler part altogether. Most of the rooms had walls painted in elaborate designs of interlaced foliage, and some had figures of people and animals in them, too. The unpainted parts of the walls were wood-paneled, and the paneling ended in crenellations. Most of the furniture was light wood, too. This was my favorite part of the castle, and I wouldn't mind living in a place done up that way. All of the rooms smelled pleasant, like the wood they were panelled in. Lots of old houses don't smell pleasant, you know. Many of them smell like mold and stale air. Not so at Bojnice.
Next, we descended the main stairs and went into the crypt, which opened into the French garden. Ján Palffy's sarcophagus is at the center of the chapel and is made of red marble. We walked through the garden and down a set of horse stairs into another courtyard, and then further down stairs and tunnels until we were properly underground. There is a subterranean chamber at the bottom of the well. When we ascended again, we were near where the tour had started. After the tour ended we walked around the outside of the castle before
we moved on.
The well from the top and from the bottom.
From 
Bojnice, Čičmany is just a short piece up the road. There is no castle in Čičmany, nor any spectacular natural wonders; it's a village where not too many people still live, although many of the houses are used as weekend homes. The reason to go to Čičmany is to look at those houses. There is a tradition in the village of decorating the wooden houses with white geometric designs on the dark wood. For this reason it's known as the "gingerbread village." Two of the houses have been converted into a museum, with old farm equipment, examples of the shoes that used to be made there, pretty embroidered folk costumes, and rooms set up as they would have been when families lived there. One of the women at the museum told us that four families had lived in one house: the parents in two rooms on the ground floor and the children in rooms built into the attic. This was in a house that was built in 1913. It's hard to imagine living with so many other people in such a small house. We walked around the village and admired the houses, and then moved on. I thought that perhaps all of the houses in Čičmany would be decorated, but they weren't. That did not make them less interesting, though.
Next we went to Žilina. We walked around there for a bit and got sandwiches and talked to a Mormon missionary who stopped because he heard us speaking English. Žilina has a pleasant downtown-type area to walk around in. It would be nice to go back there when I had more time.
Finally we drove a little further north to Strečno Castle. Strečno is nearly the polar opposite of Bojnice: it's a ruin, and it was definitely a hrad and not a zámok. According to the guidebook, we had arrived too late to start the last tour, but we decided to walk up anyway to get a closer look. Strečno is perched on top of a rather intimidating hill. The first portion is stairs, and then there's a flat place, and then an uphill road the rest of the way. From the bottom it looked like a ridiculous climb, but it really didn't take as long to get up as I thought it would. Once at the gate we managed to join a tour group and see the castle, which elicited high-fives all around. Only the kitchen, the chapel, and the central tower still have roofs; the rest of the castle is open. The views from the tower are amazing. To one side of the castle are hills covered with trees; on the other sides are farmland and the broad Vah river. The sky had cleared and it was magnificent up there.
In the chapel we read about Žofia Bosniaková, a lady who used to live at Strečno. She was a very good woman, and when she died she was buried in the crypt beneath the chapel. Some 45 years later it was discovered that her remains were preserved fairly well. They moved her, but there is a replica-mummy on display now.
When the tour was done we scrambled around the ruins for a bit, but couldn't spend too long, as they were trying to close up for the night. (We also suspected that they were having a staff barbecue there after hours, because from the tower we saw someone building a fire in some kind of grill.) More high-fives ensued, and we drove home happy with what we had been able to see.
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